Studies: Foreclosures Literally Bad for Your Health?

A little bit grizzlier than I would have wanted for a Sunday morning, but here it is anyways. 

A recent study, described below, by a Dartmouth professor found that state foreclosure rates may have been linked to suicide rates at the state level.  Previously, a different study had potentially linked foreclosures to increased blood pressure for the neighborhood - not just for those people actually in foreclosure. 

As if there weren't reason enough to get a handle on foreclosures - economic stabilization and economic justice and the like - now it looks like there may be another - public health.

The Dartmouth professor's study:

"Appearing in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health, is the first to show a correlation between foreclosure and suicide rates.

The authors analyzed state-level foreclosure and suicide rates from 2005 to 2010. During that period, the U.S. suicide rate increased by nearly 13 percent, and the number of annual home foreclosures hit a record 2.9 million (in 2010).

'It seems that foreclosures affect suicide rates in two ways,' says co-author Jason Houle, an assistant professor of sociology at Dartmouth. 'The loss of a home clearly impacts individuals and families, and can arouse feelings of loss, shame or regret. At the same time, rising foreclosure rates affect entire communities because they’re associated with a number of community-level resources and stresses, including an increase in crime, abandoned homes, and a sense of insecurity.'

The impact of foreclosures on the incidence of suicides was strongest among adults 46 to 64 years old; those in this age group also experienced the highest increase in suicide rates during the recessionary period.

. . .

'Foreclosures are a unique suicide risk among the middle-aged,' Houle says. 'Middle-aged adults are more likely to own homes and have a higher risk of home foreclosure. They’re also nearing retirement age, so losing assets at that stage in life is likely to have a profound effect on mental health and well-being.'" (link)

Eric Holder: Subtle Racism is the Greatest Threat to Racial Equality

Earlier today, Attorney General Eric Holder cited subtle forms of discrimination as the greatest danger to racial equality today:

"Speaking during the commencement ceremony at Morgan State University, a historically black college in Baltimore, Holder referred obliquely to a series of racially charged episodes that have “received substantial media coverage” in recent weeks — an apparent reference to the controversial comments made by Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling and Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy. But Holder also said that the “outlandish statements that capture national attention” obscure a more troubling reality.

These outbursts of bigotry, while deplorable, are not the true markers of the struggle that still must be waged, or the work that still needs to be done,” he said.

“The greatest threats,” he said, “are more subtle. They cut deeper. And their terrible impact endures long after the headlines have faded and obvious, ignorant expressions of hatred have been marginalized.” (link)

The Attorney General backs me up on the importance of confronting non-explicit racism:

"Holder spoke broadly about the struggle for racial equality and what he suggested was the failure of some to fully grasp the degree to which minority groups can be marginalized. He took direct aim at the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, who famously wrote in a 2007 opinion that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

“This presupposes that racial discrimination is at a sufficiently low ebb that it doesn’t need to be actively confronted,” Holder countered. “In its most obvious forms, it might be. But discrimination does not always come in the form of a hateful epithet or a Jim Crow-like statute. And so we must continue to take account of racial inequality, especially in its less obvious forms, and actively discuss ways to combat it.”  (link)

Today's speech was given on the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Civil Rights rights desegregation decision.

The full transcript of the speech is available here.

Obamacare-COBRA Loophole Partially Plugged

At least in part by the efforts of Donna Ballman at the Screw You Guys I'm Going Home blog:

"The Obama Administration just announced that it will allow people on COBRA to enroll in ACA through July 1, 2014. You'll have to call 800-318-2596 and let them know you qualify for the special enrollment period. They'll activate the special enrollment for you and you can choose from the exchanges." (link)

Read the full explanation here.

Report: Stalled New York Foreclosure Settlement Conferences

Anybody who has ever represented a homeowner in a New York foreclosure settlement conference knows all to well the contents of a report about bank misconduct in these conferences.

MFY Legal Services has, however, compiled the information in a convenient report available to all - advocate and non-advocate alike:

"New York has coped with the foreclosure crisis by implementing a pioneering settlement conference process administered by the court system, designed to promote negotiation of affordable home-saving solutions. These conferences present a remarkable opportunity for lenders and borrowers to meet face- to-face in a court supervised settlement conference at which creative solutions can be forged, and have allowed thousands of New Yorkers to avert foreclosure. But banks routinely flout the law by appearing without required information or settlement authority, causing delays that cost borrowers money and can make home-saving settlements impossible.  The process can be far more effective, and less prone to delay, if the courts rigorously enforce the requirements of the settlement conference law, as this report recommends." (link)

To make the point:

"Non-profit legal services attorneys representing low-income New York City homeowners in New York State Supreme Courts recently concluded a survey to monitor compliance with New York State’s law requiring that lenders and the law firms representing them appear at foreclosure settlement conferences with full authority to settle and resolve such cases

. . .

The survey confirmed what homeowners’ advocates in the settlement conference have long-known:

• The banks routinely violate the settlement conference law requiring them to appear at conferences with full authority to negotiate settlements and with required information needed for meaningful settlement conferences— they violated the law in 80% of the observed settlement conferences.

• The banks’ systemic violation of clear law frustrates New York’s policy to foster the early settlement of foreclosure actions as a means of preserving homeownership.

• The delay caused when the banks violate the settlement conference law harms homeowners, because interest and fees add up with each month that banks delay the process.

• Courts should rigorously enforce the settlement conference law and deter banks from violating it by penalizing parties who appear in court without the authority and information needed to negotiate in good faith" (link)

Time for a more aggressive revised foreclosure settlement conference law in New York?

Sounds like it.

Female Lawyers Still Paid Less Than Their Peers

From the WSJ:

"Despite notching significant gains in the legal world, female law-firm partners continue to lag behind their male counterparts when it comes to billing rates, commanding on average 10% less for their services, according to a new analysis of $3.4 billion in legal work.

The gap begins at the junior lawyer level, and is more pronounced among seasoned attorneys at major firms, persisting even when partners possess similar levels of experience and work in the same market, according to the review by Sky Analytics Inc., a provider of software to help companies track legal spending and invoices." (link)

Here in New York:

[T]he average male partner at a 1,000-plus lawyer firm with 13 to 24 years of experience representing investment banks was billed out at about $679 an hour, nearly 25% more than the average female partner, whose rate was $544." (link)

And as to upward advancement:

"Women make up only 17% of so-called equity partners with ownership stakes at the 200 top-grossing U.S. law firms, according to the National Association of Women Lawyers, and they are similarly underrepresented in management roles and on powerful governing committees." (link)

These number are far from encouraging.

NY Times Editorial: A New Fire Commissioner

The New York Times editorial addresses the previously covered pledge by the new NYC Fire Department Commissioner to take on the Department's past history of discriminatory hiring:

The commissioner, Daniel Nigro, struck the right tone at his appointment ceremony last week when he promised to end racial injustice in a department with more than 15,000 employees. “We must no longer wait for a judge’s ruling to tell us what fairness means,” he said. “We must get out front. We must point the way to change.” He also acknowledged that integrating the department — which is about 83 percent white in a majority-minority city — would be “a great challenge.”

. . .

Mr. Nigro clearly knows the department from the ground up. He joined in 1969 and took over the command of rescue operations on Sept. 11, 2001, when the chief of the department was killed at the World Trade Center. His long experience gives him instant credibility with the rank-and-file. It will not be easy to end discrimination in a department that has been a bastion of white male privilege for nearly 150 years. (link)

Barclays Accused of Predatory Lending Targeting Minority Homeowners in NYC

The story is available here, the class action complaint filed by MFY Legal Services is available here, and the press release is excerpted below:

"Plaintiff Tony Wong, a long-time Staten Island homeowner and school security officer for the New York City Police Department, alleges he fell prey to Barclays’ scheme to market risky, predatory mortgages in New York City’s minority neighborhoods. He claims that in September 2007, he was duped into refinancing with Barclays’ wholly owned subprime subsidiary EquiFirst Corporation.  With high monthly payments and an 11.075% interest rate, Mr. Wong’s mortgage was engineered to fail but only after his savings ran dry in his attempt to keep up with the mortgage payments. 

According to publicly available records, Mr. Wong was not the only minority who received a disastrous EquiFirst loan. During the year Mr. Wong’s loan was originated, the vast majority of the predatory loans EquiFirst issued in the New York City area were for homes in minority neighborhoods. Taking advantage of New York’s segregated housing market, Barclays, through EquiFirst, sold nearly 50% of its predatory loans to homeowners who lived in neighborhoods with 80 percent or greater minority populations. Mr. Wong’s home is located in a neighborhood that is now 69 percent minority and was 56 percent minority in 2007. These subprime mortgages were largely bundled, securitized and sold on Wall Street by investment banks like Barclays in the form of mortgage-backed securities. (link)"

MFY attorney Elizabeth M. Lynch explains:

“This lawsuit demonstrates that the profits Barclays made in the housing market run-up in the mid-2000s came on the backs of minority borrowers in New York City like Mr. Wong,” said Elizabeth M. Lynch, a staff attorney at MFY. “Barclays should be held responsible for its fraudulent conduct, and borrowers like Mr. Wong should be made whole for the suffering Barclays caused them. While the media touts the recovery of the housing market, communities of color are still reeling from the effects of the mortgage crisis.” (link)

Subconscious Bias: College Professors at Top 250 Colleges More Likely to Respond to Emails From White Males

Whenever people get into a debate about the need (or lack thereof) for anti-discrimination laws I am always fascinated. 

While I firmly believe that anti-discrimination statutes are incredibly important the fact that some people disagree with me is not surprising at all. 

However, what I find fascinating are the reasons people give for disagreeing with me. 

What I have often found is that, while people in the abstract are against discrimination, and agree steps should be taken to oppose it, they tend to refuse to accept the notion that, however high-minded they may be, they too are susceptible to subconscious biases.

The result is a vague resistance to discrimination, but with an equally vague resistance to some of the measures used to fight subconscious biases that result in discrimination - including disparate impact civil rights statutes. 

These statutes provide that, even where there is no intentional discrimination, a protected group can still be subjected to discrimination because a policy has a disparate impact on that group -- and where the defendant cannot qualify for an exception -- for example in the employment law context where that policy is not job related and/or consistent with business necessity -- the policy will be found to be discriminatory.

These disparate impact statutes have been one of the best vehicles for addressing subconscious biases because they provide a methodology to remove the policies that may (often inadvertently) exacerbate the effects of such biases. 

To help underscore the importance of the above point I will provide a series of posts that address the application of subconscious biases in a variety of employment and other contexts.

The first, although not strictly an employment matter, is what I think was an ingenious demonstration of this issue.

A study sought to determine how professor response rates to emails from students varied based on the gender and ethnicity of the student.  The result, unfortunately, unsurprisingly, was that professors were significantly more likely to ignore emails from female students and/or students of color and respond to emails from white males (based on the usual gender and/or racial association of the name):

"A group of researchers ran this interesting field experiment. They emailed more than 6,500 professors at the top 250 schools pretending to be the students. And they wrote letters saying, I really admire your work. Would you have some time to meet? The letters to the faculty were all identical, but the names of the students were all different."

. . .

[W]hat they found was there were very large disparities. Women and minorities [were] systematically less likely to get responses from the professors and also less likely to get positive responses from the professors. Now remember, these are top faculty at the top schools in the United States and the letters were all impeccably written."  (link)

In short, "[w]hite men were more likely than women and minorities to receive a reply in every discipline except the fine arts, where the bias was reversed.” (link)

Business schools should take particular notice of this study:

"The business field showed the greatest disparity — 87 percent of white men received a response; compare this to only 67 percent of women and minorities who got a reply. Other disciplines such as computer science, engineering, and math also showed a significant bias against female and minority students." (link)

One of the most interesting aspects of the study is that Asian students experienced the greatest negative bias:

Previous studies of academia have shown a positive trend with Asians in higher education institutions.  Not this time.  “Among private university faculty the response rate for white men was 29 percentage points higher than for Chinese women — the greatest disparity observed . . . .” (link)

The researchers also found that "the greater the professor's salary, the greater the difference in response rate between white men and minority students." (link) Indeed, “[f]or every 13,000 increase in salary, . . . [there was a] drop of 5 percentage points in the response rate when compared to Caucasian males.” (link)

This study is a good illustration of why it is important for tools such as the civil rights statutes, and specifically their disparate impact provisions, are such important aspects of any effort to continue to address the effects of subconscious biases. 

At least for now, the substantive equality, and ability to equally access opportunity, for all Americans, other than white males, depends on them.

You can read the complete study here and listen to coverage on NPR here.

New NYC Fire Commissioner Promises to Increase Racial Diversity and Avoid Future Discrimination Lawsuits

The new NYC Fire Department commissioner promised Friday to break from the Department's past history of racial exclusion in hiring.

From the NY Times:

"The new commissioner of the New York Fire Department vowed on Friday to put an end to an era of lawsuits and court orders over the department’s persistent lack of diversity and to lead an effort to attract more minorities.

. . .

Flanked by diverse members of the newest class of recruits, Mr. Nigro, 65, described expanding diversity in the department, whose members are still about 87 percent white, as “a great challenge,” but one he would actively pursue.

“We must no longer wait for a judge’s ruling to tell us what fairness means,” he said. “We must get out front. We must point the way to change.” (link)

In March, the De Blasio administration agreed to settle a class action lawsuit alleging race discrimination in hiring by the NYC Fire Department against African-American and Latino applicants for approximately $100 million in relief to the class.

As the district court found, the NYC Fire Department's history of excluding black applicants was profound:

"Black residents make up 25.6% of New York City’s population; when this case was filed in 2007, black firefighters accounted for only 3.4% of the Department’s force. In other words, in a city of over eight million people, and out of a force with 8,998 firefighters, there were only 303 black firefighters. This pattern of underrepresentation has remained essentially unchanged since at least the 1960s." (link)

As the Second Circuit also observed, this discrimination is nothing recent, and the instant case was not the first time the department had been sued for the same reason:

"Even after [a]  1973 determination that [the NYC Fire Department] hiring exam was invalid because of a racially disparate impact the City’s percentage of black entry level firefighters has remained at or below 4 percent for several decades, and the current percentage of 3.4 percent compares woefully 20 to the 16.6 percent achieved by the city’s Police Department and the 21 61.4 percent achieved by the City’s Corrections Department." (link)

Only time will tell if the NYC Fire Department takes real steps to increase racial diversity and avoid future civil rights litigation.

NY Times Editorial: How to Fix the Mortgage Market

Available here:

"A bipartisan bill that the Senate Banking Committee is expected to vote on soon seeks to rejuvenate the housing finance market while guarding against the excesses of the past. Named the Housing Finance Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act of 2014, it aims to ensure broad and steady access to sustainable and affordable mortgages, in part by providing an explicit government guarantee to attract investment in 30-year fixed-rate mortgages and other loans. It also seeks to protect taxpayers from future bailouts partly by requiring those who package and sell mortgage loans to hold capital to absorb losses.

Importantly, it includes a new financing provision, essentially a fee on government-guaranteed securities, to generate money for affordable housing.

For all of its positive attributes, however, the Senate bill is fatally marred by two provisions buried in the text. One, named the “investor immunity” provision, is ostensibly aimed at protecting mortgage investors from legal liability for transgressions by lenders, guarantors or other participants in the mortgage process.

. . .

Another section of the bill, dubbed the “business judgment” rule, is ostensibly aimed at preventing the government from meddling in the decisions of mortgage-market participants as to which loans to include in various mortgage securities." (link)